Create Writing

Getting Started

General Information

Writers usually meet in the Writers' Forum. This is where you can go to discuss possible contributions to mainline Wesnoth writing (campaign dialog, unit descriptions, etc.), work on the Wesnoth Manual, collect reference information about the world of Wesnoth, world-build, and do other writerly things. If you have an IRC client, you can also join the #wesnoth-writing channel on irc.freenode.net and talk about writing in realtime.

To be included in the Battle for Wesnoth, text must be released and available under the Gnu General Public License. Read this forum post by Jetryl and Wesnoth:Copyrights for more information on this.

Where Should I Start?

The Writers' Forum is fairly new. It's fairly easy to have a look around and see what's up.

Part of what writers are doing now is world building; keep in mind that this involves bringing together information from all over the Wesnoth universe. In other words, this forum does contain spoilers.

Reference Material

These materials may contain spoilers. This is necessary for writers, who may not want or need to play through a campaign to work over the dialog. If you don't want spoilers, you're in the wrong place.

Current Writing

The current text for Wesnoth can be accessed in various places. Most obviously, you see the text when you play the game. Less obviously, you can look through the scenario config files (found in your game data directory) to see the dialogue, and you can easily access unit descriptions through the Wesnoth Unit Tree.

There is also a current project to copy all campaign dialogue onto the wiki.

The World of Wesnoth

• The mainline campaigns of Wesnoth
• The history of Wesnoth
• The geography of Wesnoth
• The factions of Wesnoth
• The races of creatures in Wesnoth
• (Eleazar on Orcs and Trolls)
• A list of hero descriptions
• A detailed family tree of the Garardine Dynasty
• Secret Lore

Style Guides

A draft Typography Style Guide is now being added. Once enough people have had a chance to look at it, it will stop being draft. There are two areas where this has a bearing - in mainline campaigns, and in the Wesnoth user interface itself. For user-made content, writers have much more freedom, but to become mainline a campaign will ultimately need to follow whatever our established style guide becomes. A writing style guide is a much bigger undertaking, but may follow later. There are already some guidelines on how to write Wesnoth material on the internet. (Link to follow shortly.) We also need a C and WML coding style guides and a user interface style guide.

For programmers, there is already a ProgrammingStandards document. Note that that document takes precedence over any other coding style guides given below, but it's very general. The user interface has some quite specific requirements which the main programming standard document doesn't cover.

The Wesnoth UI (user interface) has a mixed setup. Part of it is hard-coded within the game's source code, which means you need to be able to at least read C program code to understand what is going on. The remainder is stored in a variety of WML files, which are easier for non-programmers to read and can be altered without having to recompile the program. With the ongoing Wesnoth GUI2 project http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=29640&hilit=GUI2&start=0 this setup will be simplified, making custom 'skins' easier to create. A draft [UI Style Guide] is now also available. Note that it is likely to be changed significantly once the version 2 GUI comes fully on-line.

Useful Resources: These are not tutorials!

You can't really have a tutorial on how to write. Everyone has a different process. However, here are some pages from the internet that you could glance at before taking up your pen.

• A Primer for SF Workshops